The 5 Laws of Engagement

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Law 1: We seek comfort in relationships: Surround us with community, which we’ve seen success with like Facebook, Twitter and 4chan. Most interestingly is PostSecret, an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets…

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For or against?

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Looking at your enterprise vision – or any kind of future intent – is it defined in terms of being for something? Or against something? That distinction can sometimes seem subtle – yet it’s very important indeed… On the surface, it always seems a lot easier to be ‘against’ something. Many NGOs define themselves this way; […]

Application Portfolio Management Ranks Top in New EA Survey

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We see it every day with our customers, and now the numbers prove it: EA is playing a more strategic role every day in driving value from IT, with application portfolio management (APM) leading the way.
APM – the process of eliminating obsolete, …

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Dimensions of EA maturity

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@gotze (John Gøtze) kindly sent me a copy of his 2010 paper Architecting the Firm (written with Pat Turner and Peter Bernus). My interest had been stimulated by Anders Jensen, who described the paper as follows in his blog on the Thinking Enterpri…

How to Start a BPM Initiative: A Lesson from Early Adopters

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Business process management (BPM) initiatives are growing in popularity because thousands of organizations have proven the measurable value BPM can deliver at a lower cost and in a dramatically shorter time than with traditional solution development approaches. Early BPM adopters have achieved an exceptional amount of success in their BPM deployments and there is a […]

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  2. Who Drives an Enterprise Architecture Initiative?
    Part 3     Enterprise Architecture (EA) projects are often thought to be initiated…
  3. Must See Guide to Forrester Business Process Forum 2011 The Forrester Business Process Forum in Boston, Mass. is just three…

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More on starting EA from scratch

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A follow-on to the previous post ‘Where do we start with EA? – a practical question‘, to address a number of comments and questions that came up via the Twitterstream. Again, I’ll keep the emphasis on the ‘how-to’, and hold back on the theory this time. (Have a wander elsewhere through this blog for the […]

Let’s Kill the Confusion About Capabilities for Once and All!

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I note in the Business Process Trends Advisor Paul Harmon is confused about what is a capability. What Harmon is missing is that capabilities are not just another modelling device that further helps to understand the business. Rather they are core structural concepts that allow us to establish independent units of capability. Capabilities are coarse grained business components that are inherently reusable. We define the characteristics as follows:

  • Service Oriented: Offers a software service.
  • Composite: May encapsulate all manner of behaviors including process, utility, core business (data) services.
  • Enduring: Outlives changes to how it is realized or the business processes that use it
  • Process Independent: May be used within several business processes
  • Implementation Independent: independent of how, where or by whom the capability is realized. Does not pre-empt or expose how each action is executed internally. Internal processes could therefore be changed and not impact the user of the capability service providing the contract remains unchanged.
  • Minimum Dependency: May depend upon another where a) it needs some other capability to have been exercised first or b) where there are internal dependencies. Some capabilities can be independent or self-contained. See below.
  • Measurable: Performance must be measurable

CBDI recommends:

  • whilst “not standalone” capabilities may be tactical necessities, standalone, fully independent capabilities are essential for maximum business agility, enabling replication, offshoring, ecosystem partner provisioning etc and reducing the horizon of change
  • also enabling maximum business agility, capabilities should offer a software service which is externalized, exposing the business capability to a wider world.

Harmon asks for examples. Look no further than Amazon – they offer well-formed capabilities that externalize the Amazon business such as Cloud Service; Storefront etc.

For more on this topic see the October CBDI Journal. It is free with simple registration.

Business Process Trends Advisor – Capabilities Again